From September, 2010

A good deal of buzz has been generated recently about the use of two-way video in screening candidates. Companies are now looking to employ video conferenced interviews with candidates to save money on travel costs. The only problem is, the hiring manager still must take time out of their day to interview a candidate who may or may not be suited for the job. If the candidate is unsuitable then the interview is essentially a waste of the manager’s time. What if you could take this process one step farther, eliminate the interviewer from the first round, and allow the candidate to interview themselves?

On Aug. 24th Hire-Intelligence, LLC introduced Video-View™, a revolutionary, online solution to prescreening job candidates. Interview4™, which is the latest in Hire-Intelligence’s suite of products and services designed for the human resources industry, offers employers, recruiters and search firms the benefits of interviews recorded and delivered over the internet. Interview4™ is a proprietary self-interviewing tool that allows candidates to answer a number of pre-determined interview questions online over a personal computer using a webcam. Interview4™ provides built-in candidate management which allows employers to quickly and easily keep track of job candidates. Job candidates use their computer and a webcam to answer questions pre-selected or customized by employers. The candidate’s responses are recorded and immediately uploaded to Hire-Intelligence’s secure video servers for the hiring manager’s review. After candidates have completed their Interview4 interviews, employers can review their videos at any time from the Interview4 site.

Benefits:
Save on Travel Costs Share with colleagues
Review multiple times
Eliminate unecessary follow-up interviews
Easier to schedule than a phone screen
More revealing than a phone screen

A recent study by Careerbuilder suggests that 40% of employers will replace lower performing employees with higher performers in 2010. This may make perfect sense but when you analyze the cost of a departing employee, it would have made much more sense to spend a minimal amount of money up front to save barrel loads of cash later. Think about this! Let’s say the average salary of an employee working at your company is $50,000 a year. The cost of replacing an employee is 1.5 times that person’s salary or $75,000. The percentage is higher when that departing employee is in a sales or managerial position. If you organization of 1000 employees has a turnover of 10%, then your cost of turnover is 7.5 million dollars a year!

Why are these people leaving or why have they been fired? Let’s first address why they left. According to Leigh Branham’s book The 7 Hidden Reasons Employees Leave, three of the main reasons an employee leaves an organization is for more money elsewhere, lack of advancement potential, and a mismatch between employee and manager. As a recruiter or hiring manager you can’t always control how much your top talent is getting paid or how sufficiently they are challenged in the job, but you can certainly screen candidates for on-the-job behaviors. More specifically, by screening a candidate for their behavior and conducting structured, behaviorally based interviews, hiring managers are able to determine whether a candidate is a fit not just for the job but also for them. How well a hiring manager gets on with their employees and how well they get along with them, greatly effects on-the-job performance.

Approximately 95% of companies believe that assessments are a valuable part of their hiring process but only 51% use personality assessments and only 29% use cultural fit assessments. So you’ve found your superstar employee, but if he/she is not a fit for your organization culturally or with your managers behaviorally, then you’ll soon find yourself without them. Hire-Intelligence is one useful assessment tool that provides a behaviorally based interview guide and measures candidates for varying aspects of their personality.

Why was your employee fired? Again they perhaps were not a cultural or behavioral fit with your organization and either did not get along with their colleagues or manager.

Despite what their qualifications say on their resume, the departing employee may not have possessed some of the skills necessary for the position. Eighty-five percent of employers currently use or plan to use skills based testing in 2010. Popular vendors are Hire-Intelligence and Eskill.

Often overlooked assessments are writing and listening assessments designed to determine a candidate’s ability to write and listen effectively. Naturally most recruiters assume all candidates possess these abilities but as more foreign laborers enter the work force, you can’t take these skills for granted. In this age of customer service and emails, written and listening communication is essential. Companies lost millions in business last year due to poorly crafted emails and lost orders because the employee lacked either the ability to understand the customer or could not properly respond to an email request for more information.

Part III of my blog post, “Save the hiring manager’s time” will be out soon. Until next time.